These A.I. bros need to think again

Jesus loves you -- on your e-Bike.

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Few things make me angrier these days than reading about artificial intelligence.

My hope is that I have read enough and thought about this enough to stake out a position that is beyond Old Man Yells At Cloud, but I am comfortable enough to know that there is a lot more to learn and that even if I’m just yelling at a could for now it is healthy to vent.

And so, my reaction probably skews a little too visceral to a recent New York Times piece with the headline, “This A.I. Company Wants to Take Your Job.”

If you’ve read at all about artificial intelligence, you probably know is an exceedingly wide range of outcomes predicted when it comes to its impact on society and the future of work.

As A.I. gets better at more complex tasks and thoughts, there will undoubtedly be a disruption to work as we know it. Indeed, there are already hints of this showing up in recent employment reports in some fields, particularly for entry-level jobs.

But as noted at the top of that Times piece by Kevin Roose:

Years ago, when I started writing about Silicon Valley’s efforts to replace workers with artificial intelligence, most tech executives at least had the decency to lie about it.

Maybe I should prefer a harsher truth to a softer lie, but I did not find myself giving out points for honesty when reading further about the start-up in question.

Writes Roose:

Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

“Our goal is to fully automate work,” said Tamay Besiroglu, 29, one of Mechanize’s founders. “We want to get to a fully automated economy, and make that happen as fast as possible.”

While I’m sure some of this is just bluster from a start-up trying to raise funds and be a disruptor in the space, as the kids say, having this as a stated goal is a wee bit problematic to me.

It’s not that I harbor some illusion about how great many soul-crushing jobs are, nor do I think we have reached our peak as a society with our current version of capitalism.

It is that these A.I. bros in particular and the conversation about A.I. in general has no real answer to the fundamental question of all this: What if they’re right? What if in 10, 20 or even 30 years they are able to fully automate large parts of the workforce and our economy.

What happens to everyone whose jobs no longer exist?

To this, Mechanize (not to pick on them, but they’re the featured subject) gestures and waves a magic wand.

Again, from the piece:

But I also found their pitch strangely devoid of empathy for the people whose jobs they’re trying to replace, and unconcerned with whether society is ready for such profound change.

Mr. Besiroglu said he believed that A.I. would eventually create “radical abundance” and wealth that could be redistributed to laid-off workers, in the form of a universal basic income that would allow them to maintain a high living standard.

But like many A.I. companies working on labor-replacing technology, Mechanize has no novel policy proposals to help smooth the transition to an A.I.-driven economy, no brilliant ideas about expanding the social safety net or retraining workers for new jobs — only a goal of making the current jobs obsolete as quickly as possible.

This is the whole f****** game, guys. This is the problem that needs to be solved first, not second.

Did we learn nothing from the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs in the last 45 years (and particularly the last 25 years coinciding with China’s rise as an economic power)?

I still remember the vague notion that workers in those industries could be retrained into different fields as machines took their jobs. I invite you to visit almost any small- to midsized city between the coasts to see how that worked out.

The machines weren’t evil. The plan was bad. A.I. has the potential to be the white collar version.

Do you really think companies who save massively on labor costs are going to gleefully redistribute a lot of that wealth to laid off workers? Do you really think a system of government that has a hard time with socialized anything is going to go for universal guaranteed income?

Even if that was somehow made the law of the land, what is everyone going to do with themselves?

Freed from the constraints of a workday, will we pursue our passions and interests in order to make society better? I think you know the answer to that. We will get lazier and lazier, staring more blankly at our phones, particularly as A.I. continues to creep in and replace the decisions we need to make.

We need a collective sense of purpose, not even more time to avoid it. And we need an A.I. plan that goes far beyond “we’ll figure it out down the road” because it’s always too late when the money has changed hands.

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This either has nothing to do with what preceded it or everything, but I can’t shake an encounter earlier this week.

I was out for a short run on the side of a neighborhood over the lunch hour when a young rider passed me (safely, I should note) going roughly 25 mph on a souped-up e-Bike. I watched him disappear into the distance, and not long after I was passed by an older couple going much slower on conventional bikes.

A few minutes later, as I slowed to a walk on a roasting day and prepared to turn right onto a regional park trail, I saw the two older cyclists. They had stopped to adjust their equipment and get a drink of water. The gentleman looked up at me and said, “Did you see the kid that passed us on the e-Bike?” I replied that I had.

“Did you happen to see what was on the back of his shirt?” he asked. Strangely enough, I had noticed what was written on the back of his shirt. “Yes,” I replied. “Jesus loves you.”

“Jesus loves you,” the man repeated. “Hilarious. Jesus loves you — on an e-Bike.”

I spent the better part of the rest of the journey trying to decide why that particular combination of things was so hilarious to that man on the bicycle.

This sort of interaction and idea spark is my favorite part of being in nature, out for a run, on a trail, disconnected from technology and certainly some other substitute for intelligence.

A.I. might try to come for my job someday. But it will never come for my thoughts.